I was at the airport recently and there was a mother with a 6-month-old baby in a sling strapped to her chest. The plane had been delayed a few minutes while we were boarding. The baby started to get bored in the queue and just ever so slightly fussed. The mother immediately whipped out her phone and held it in front of him and the baby basically inhaled whatever was on the screen. In this instance, at 6 months old with thanks to modern technology, this baby had 0.2 of a second of boredom and uncomfortableness.
It made me think of another example. Kids and eating. All parents have had a moment where they need to engage in a total power play around getting their kids to eat a meal (my hand is raised!). Usually, we decorate the battle with the promise of desert, or an iPad is thrust in front of them. Just stop for a second and consider it. You must make the act of eating easier for your child. Why don’t we just use hunger? If your child doesn’t eat the meal in front of them, how about letting hunger be the motivator for them to eat? Is that not the reality of not eating? But we don’t do this do we, we couldn’t possibly let them experience the actual consequence and simple fact of life that if you don’t eat you get hungry and by not doing this, we are disallowing our kids to feel any sort of discomfort.
Doesn’t the saying go “life starts when you are outside of your comfort Zone”? If we are making our children’s life too comfortable, how do we expect them to personally evolve? Why would they bother to?
In perspective, life today has generally never been so comfortable for the average child. Everything is at their fingertips. There has never been so much support from parents and schools. They have so many opportunities but so many expectations. Not allowing our children to feel discomfort is setting them up for a very painful adulthood because we are setting them up for an unrealistic way of life. We use the word resilience a lot in schools. But the only way to build up resilience is to have discomfort. Without discomfort there is nothing to be resilient too.
A frustrated parent posted on social media the other day saying, “after I spent all morning doing chores, my teen woke up at 2pm and I told him to take the rubbish out to which he replied, ‘Do I have to do everything?”. Is this the level of expectations we are creating for our future adults?
A beautiful friend confided that she gets up at 5:30am to check that her son is up as he sleeps through his alarm, so he isn’t late for work. What? No! Let his boss threaten him with losing his job as a motivator to get his feet on the floor in the morning… in fact make your mum a cup of tea in bed before you go too!
Adversity is a great motivator. We need to reframe how we parent. Our job is not to cushion the falls, not to protect from failure and not to carry the burden of our kids’ shortfalls. We have enough on our own plate! We need to teach them to embrace life’s challenges and hard times, to embrace chaos and to embrace mistakes as these are the moments you learn and grow. We can only give them the tools, the rest is up to them.
So maybe, the next time your child says they are bored for 5 seconds on the weekend while you are trying to saviour your first sip of an actual hot tea in 3 years, and you drop everything to take them to the park or a movie. How about handing them the washing to hang out? Or passing them the toilet brush? Watch how quickly they find something to do!
Or the next time you go to email the teacher supporting an excuse for late homework, so they don’t get a detention- stop and let them learn the discomfort of actions and consequences. Let them forget their sports uniform and walk home in the rain. Does your teen want money to hang with friends, ok, how about they get a job? Is that not the reality? There must be a balance of being kind and supportive but also being a parent that teaches them to fly.
At the end of the day, it’s not our job to protect them from life’s discomforts, but to gently guide them through it. It’s in the discomfort that we truly learn to evolve and adapt. We all have our life lessons to learn, let’s not take that privilege away from them.